Sunday, April 19, 2015

Toronto’s waterfront is a marvel in spring,
and one of the best places to see the cycle of new life resume is at
Colonel Samuel Smith Park at the foot of Kipling Ave.

There, a building boom is underway: recently
returned songbirds are busy constructing nests, mute swans are checking
out building sites and a family of beavers is diligently expanding and
refurbishing its lodge.

But on a visit to this park on April 7, a day
when the inner bay was still more than three-quarters covered with ice,
it was the home-building efforts of a pair of red-necked grebes (Podiceps grisegena) that caught my attention.

These grebes, medium-sized water birds that
look like something Picasso might have created if he had crossed a
common loon with a red-breasted merganser, have elaborate, elegant
courtship displays I’ve written about before.

But on this particular day, the pair I was
watching had moved past courting and to the living together stage. Out
in the bay, they were hard at work building a home for their future
family, one carefully placed stick at a time.

There was a rhythm to their construction
efforts. Dive, return to the surface with a stick in their beaks, swim
to the nest and delicately, with military precision, place it on the
growing woodpile.

There was only one problem: the two birds were
building their nest on slushy ice at the very edge of the open water. A
day or two of warmer spring temperatures would see the birds’
meticulously constructed home on the bottom of the lake and, with that,
an inevitable delay in the race to reproduce.

Grebes have been around for 40 million years.
How could eons of evolution not have imbued them with an instinct to
build their nest in a more appropriate place? Perhaps these grebes were
not the most perspicacious Podiceps in the pond. Could they be contenders for the Darwin Award, avian edition?

After some research into these questions back
at home, I quickly learned that my judgment of this pair’s homemaking
skills had been unduly harsh. Because their peculiar anatomy makes it
difficult for them to walk on land, red-necked grebes normally build
their nests in open water, where they essentially float, tethered to
subaquatic vegetation. Perhaps the grebes at the park weren’t so dumb
after all; their nest might simply float, anchored to plant life beneath
the water’s surface.

There was only one way to find out. I waited
for a week of warmer temperatures to melt the ice covering the bay and
then headed back to the park last week.

It was a glorious day with spring’s fertile
promise heard in the burbling song of the blackbirds in the marsh and
smelled in the aroma of mud and the tang of lake water. Far out in the
bay, long-tailed ducks yodelled and dozens of pairs of red-necked grebes
whinnied, providing a contrapuntal top note to the scene.

I made my way to the place where I had seen
the grebe pair building their nest on the ice. I was hoping to see their
raggedy construction floating on the water. But there was nary a stick
or decaying leaf to be seen. It seemed the birds’ building efforts had
been in vain.

But all was not necessarily lost for this
grebe pair. Pat Leonard at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology told me it’s
not uncommon for floating grebe nests to be destroyed by wind or waves.

“Early nest failures are pretty common among
this species and they are more than willing to try again,” Leonard said
by email. “When nesting fails, grebe pairs will renest up to five times —
until they get it right.”

He didn’t seem to be worried about a potential delay in the birds’ reproductive timetable, either.

“There is enough lag time between their
arrival on the breeding grounds and the laying of eggs to accommodate
these events,” he explained.

Leonard’s words came to me when I observed a
grebe pair appearing to set up house only metres from where the ice nest
had been. The birds seemed to be testing an old rubber tire for its
fitness as a potential home site. I could see no plant matter sticking
out of the tire, but perhaps it was there, just below my angle of view.

I watched a long time as the two birds — one
inside the tire and the other outside — interacted, vocalizing
constantly and touching their beaks together. At one point, the bird on
the inside, the female, I think, raised herself up almost vertically,
shook vigorously, then settled back down into the hole of the tire. It
looked like she was laying an egg.

There’s no certainty, of course, that the tire
grebes and the ice nest grebes were the same pair. But I have a strong
feeling they were.

Whatever the case, I wish them luck in the
reproductive stakes ahead. I’ll be back in a few more weeks to see if I
can catch a glimpse of their zebra-striped hatchlings.

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A community group of local residents and park users dedicated to protecting, enhancing and promoting the naturalized areas of Colonel Samuel Smith Park in South Etobicoke, Ontario.

Sam Smith Park is the jewel of the Lakeshore - a tranquil, waterfront sanctuary of wetlands, woods, shore and meadow. It supports a magnificent web of life with a diversity of environments that provide food, habitat and protection for the many species of plants and the birds and animals that pass through or call it home. The gentle sounds and green beauty of the park provide a restorative, stress reducing element to the life of the residents of the Lakeshore and to the increasing number of lucky visitors who are discovering its special gifts.

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